No Luck, No Golden Chances, No Mitigating Circumstances
“Touch…I remember touch.”
As I wrote in my recent post about the films, songs, games and other art that moved and haunted me most in 2013, nothing quite sums up my year like the Daft Punk song, Touch. The painful awakening, the desperate yearning for connection, the feeling that love is within reach, then disappears, revealing itself to be an illusion. The song has become something that I endure when my phone shuffles it up. It hurts but I think it’s good for me to feel what it makes me feel. It sure beats not feeling.
As I was recently struggling to focus on mundane tasks like laundry and grocery shopping while my heart was aching, I thought of another, earlier song of my life that’s also about how touch can shatter the walls we build around ourselves, or break through the veneer of banality that sometimes creeps over life.
“No more miracles, loaves and fishes
Been so busy with the washing of the dishes”
As a high-schooler, I watched my VHS copy of Peter Gabriel’s POV concert dozens of times. I was electrified by what I saw as his charisma, his strange dancing, his willingness to be so unusual and distinctive a performer. But perhaps my favorite moment in the entire concert is the one that comes during the final 45 seconds of this performance of Lay Your Hands On Me, when he is no longer going through the ritualistic motions of a performance, but is leaping and smiling and sweating, loose and alive and free. To me, the song is about the power of touch and connection to break through the mundanity of life, to bring significance to that which is otherwise without significance. And the performance perfectly reflects how touch can do just that.
Wait for it. Sometimes, we just need to wait for it.
I am ready.
I am willing.
I believe.